Björk’s Visions of an Enchanted Future

“Utopia,” her new album, suggests that each of us can make the world in which we want to live.

Björk’s music has never been paranoid about technology or change. Her optimism comes through on “Utopia.”

Illustration by MVM

One day, I realized, to my surprise, that Björk was a normal person who did everyday things. Few pop musicians have seemed so futuristic and so weird for as long as she has. Since the early nineteen-nineties, the Icelandic artist has charted extremes—of ecstasy and intimacy, creativity and destruction—always attuned to the possibilities emerging from dance music’s experimental communities. Everything she does feels powered by an intense, full-bodied commitment, as though animated by forces greater than anything the rest of us will ever encounter. So it was shocking when, once, I saw her quietly shopping for CDs. We know that stars are just like us. But Björk has always seemed like her own solar system.

Part of the reason Björk has stood apart is that she projects complete confidence in her own vision, whether it lights on music, politics, performance, or fashion. (Her outfits—think of the swan dress she wore, at the 2001 Academy Awards—were Internet memes before such things existed.) But the most avant-garde aspect of her work has always been her willingness to defy the conventional structures of song. Starting in the early nineties, Björk’s solo albums had a way of translating the all-night euphoria of dance music into short, riotous bursts of sound. In the early two-thousands, she began composing with software like Pro Tools and Sibelius, and her music took an inward turn. Instead of hooks or choruses, there were intensities, pulses, sung words that meandered and then dissolved into crystalline sound. They were barely songs. But they were enough. The listener got the impression that language was insufficient to express her highs and lows.

In 2015, Björk released the album “Vulnicura,” whose context was her painful split from her longtime partner, the American artist Matthew Barney. The songs on it felt weary and doomed, expressing despair and also preventing her from falling too deep into its grasp. Now Björk, who is fifty-two, has released her tenth album, “Utopia.” In August, she hinted that it would be about putting herself back together and having fun again—her “Tinder record,” she joked. (In a recent interview, she pointed out that she is probably too famous to actually use the hookup app.) In September, she released “The Gate,” a single from the album, which sounds like a nighttime traipse through a pixellated forest, cricket chirps mixing with manipulated woodwinds and a murmuring synth line. “Didn’t used to be so needy / Just more broken than normal,” she sings. “Proud self-sufficiency / My silhouette is oval / It is a gate.” It feels as if she is exploring these soundscapes herself, searching for a melody that will steady her on her path.

“Utopia” suggests that each of us can make the world in which we want to live. The album is spacious, filled with flutes, choirs, field recordings of birdsong—sounds that describe a place and also a peace-seeking state of mind. But the wounds are still there, and it’s bracing how direct Björk’s lyrics can be. On “Sue Me,” presumably a reference to a lawsuit that Barney filed for more “equitable custody” of their daughter, she repeats the title over and over, wrestling with the words until she seems to strangle them of any meaning. She blends her voice into the lush orchestration of “Tabula Rasa,” as she sings about her desire that the “fuckups of the fathers” will skip a generation. “I hope to give you the least amount of luggage,” she tells a child, controlling her quavering voice, as though to project a kind of self-restraint.

She ends up where so many of us do after a colossal breakup: out having fun, trying to evade the past but seeing traces of it anyway. (In her case: a beard, glimpsed from a distance.) There are hints at new pleasures and a mention of “Googling love.” Over the glistening harps of “Blissing Me,” she sings of “two music nerds obsessing,” sending each other songs. A file format has never sounded so lovely as when Björk stretches out the syllables of “MP3s.”

Naturally, friendship also fills the lover’s void, which is fitting, since her creativity has always been spurred by a kind of playful camaraderie. She has remarked in the past that critics often take her for someone else’s muse, the product of a male producer’s vision. She was getting at the different standards applied to female genius. She exercises meticulous control over every sound she makes, but she has collaborated with an eclectic, comparatively obscure circle, including the experimental cut-and-paste duo Matmos and the house musician Mark Bell, who died in 2014. For “Utopia,” she put together an all-women twelve-piece flute orchestra—a gesture that was as much about atmospherics as politics.

Björk co-produced almost all of the new album with Alejandro Ghersi, a twenty-eight-year-old Venezuelan artist who records as Arca. Ghersi grew up listening to Björk, and you can hear traces of her influence on his latest album, “Arca,” which was released this spring. His music, which has always been unnervingly emotional, full of shifting, ambient textures, doesn’t require language to convey joy or pain. But on “Arca” he decided to sing, and his strident, dramatic vocals are a guide through his twisted synth compositions. He credits Björk’s friendship as the catalyst for this new turn in his music; on one song, he even quotes her.

“Utopia” actually sounds like a place—a quiet, enchanted ecosystem with a constant thrum of activity. It harks back to one of music’s oldest aspirations, to replicate the delights of the natural world. Occasionally, a mess of programmed drums or wobbly bass cuts through the quiet. But then Björk’s voice returns, restoring a kind of balance. It’s the type of power that drives many of the contemporary musicians who descend from her, like Kelela and FKA Twigs, artists who are enamored of the tension between what yearnings a voice can describe and what realities a machine can conjure. These days, Björk no longer seems that strange. Perhaps her greatest influence isn’t merely musical—it’s about seeing the world in an unfamiliar way.

When I first heard Björk’s music, I was fascinated by her seemingly uncomplicated embrace of technology. The mid-nineties were a time when computers and the Internet still felt exhilarating and a little bit dangerous, mostly because nobody could predict what the revolution that they represented might beget. But Björk’s music was never paranoid about change. It had a sense of optimism, even then, about the future. She never sounded subsumed by the machinery, even when she seemed to be wailing against its rhythms. Instead, there was a faith that samplers and processors could help us transmit something essential about ourselves. She was an early adopter of the Internet and of production software. She has dabbled in virtual reality. Purchasers of “Utopia” will receive cryptocurrency. Even when she has warned, in recent interviews, of our ecological catastrophe, she stays hopeful that a tech visionary might figure out a solution.

In precarious times, it’s difficult to see beyond the present, let alone to set our sights farther out. There’s a kind of luxury to the songs on “Utopia,” in their capacity to be so precious and so particular about language and sound. Is it a form of retreat, or is it magic? Maybe we can think of a good song as its own type of utopia—a pursuit of perfection that succeeds or fails for a moment, depending on whether its hook or its melodies or its performance catches listeners the right way. Björk’s songs imagine heights that aren’t so easily achieved. Instead, they are about the pursuit, futile or not, of harmony. “Imagine a future and being in it,” she sings on “Future Forever,” the album’s final song. It’s majestic and slow, with a pair of resplendent synth chords rippling outward. “Your past is a loop / Turn it off.” It’s a sublime texture in search of a song. It slowly takes shape, and then it becomes a vision to be followed. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the December 4, 2017, issue, with the headline “Forward March.”

Hua Hsu began contributing to The New Yorker in 2014, and became a staff writer in 2017.